CONSTRUCTING THE IDENTITY OF A NATION-STATE SYMBOLIC CONFLICT OVER THE PREAMBLE TO THE CONSTITUTION

The conflict over the contents of the preamble to the Constitution of the Polish Third Republic is presented as a symbolic discursive struggle on the public arena led by organized collective agents - the representatives of political parties, NSZZ 'Solidarnosc' and the Roman-Catholic Church. It is a study of the function of symbolization, based on the example of constitutionalism, which describes the undercurrents of the winning and maintaining of political power with the use of symbols after the collapse of the realty existing socialism. The writing of the preamble was an interactive process. The authoress claims that the meaning of the preamble can only be understood by contextualization, i.e. by recreating the symbolic interactions during its writing. She focuses primarily on various stages of the negotiations, as well as strategies and tactics associated with the inclusion of the invocatio dei. Special importance is accorded to the entries which assumed a dialectical form - the expressions 'We, the Polish Nation - all the citizens of the Republic, both those who believe in God, as the source of truth, justice, good and beauty, as well as those not sharing such faith but respecting those universal values as arising from other sources' and 'recognizing our responsibility before God and our own consciences'. These expressions symbolically mark the borders of a consensus, which means that the society is divided within the bounds of a problematic identity of the nation-state of the Polish Third Republic. The authoress discussed also the structure of civil, national, universal, religious and secular values in the final version of the preamble.